Field of Art
This invention relates generally to managing pay-per-click internet based marketing campaigns and, more particularly, to performance base advertisement for maximizing delivery of leads to a business and return on investment for such campaigns.
Background Art
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising revolutionized direct marketing to consumers on the internet. GoTo was one of the first to introduce the concept of PPC advertising. Today PPC is fundamental to the monetization of search-engine results and fundamental to driving qualified traffic to websites. E-commerce sites and large brand sites were the first to adopt PPC as a marketing strategy while small and medium sized businesses have been slow to move in that direction. A small business values direct customer interaction through a phone call or email, and regards a click to a website as only the first step in the sale conversion funnel. Measuring the conversion from clicks to calls as well as understanding the conversion of calls to customers realized is necessary to properly manage the PPC campaign and ensure positive return-on-advertiser-spend (ROAS). This places the burden on the small business owner to collect data and run complex analytical calculations on a regular basis. If the calculations are flawed because of lack of data or scarcity of quality data, the business owner may overspend for traffic that does not deliver ROAS or underspend and not receive any traffic.
The primary challenge with PPC for a small business is that the business owner is interested in leads, such as phone calls, emails, filled out lead forms requesting services, and less interested in website clicks. The pay-per-click model has been modified to other models, for example, the pay-per-call (PPCall) model by Ingenio where a business sets up a campaign similar to a PPC campaign but is bidding for calls not clicks. While these models may be more attractive to the small business owner, these models do not solve their problem of providing visibility into the call volume (or lead volume) that will be delivered and the effective cost-per-lead incurred. In addition, leads are delivered in unpredictable bursts that can overwhelm a small business owner's ability to process them and results in waste.
From the perspective of a small business owner what is needed is a method and a system that provides predictable lead volume and price transparency of the effective cost-per-lead. What is further needed is a method and system that delivers the leads consistently throughout the duration of the campaign.
Another concern of business owners is managing the bidding or auction process for on-line keyword search engines. Businesses often will bid on keywords for search engine providers such that their advertisement or website is at the top of the list of search results when a user enters a search query using certain keywords. The problem, is managing the bidding process to be cost effective and achieve the greatest result. To address this concern businesses often hire marketing consulting firms to manage the bidding process. The consulting firms manage the pay-per-click ad campaigns and the bidding process in order to achieve the businesses' click-through realization goals. The consulting firms often use rule based algorithms to establish and maintain keyword bidding. However, managing the bidding process has its difficulties, particularly if the consulting firm is managing multiple businesses that are very similar.